by submission | Jun 22, 2013 | Story
Author : David Kavanaugh
YOUR SPECIES NEEDS YOU!
That’s right, you! All of you brave men and women out there who watched the skies light up on January 8th and felt your hearts swell with rage, passion, and love of species. Never forget that day, brave humans, for the Silvers certainly will not! Honor the memory of those fallen. Enlist today, receive your Flock Implant, and join the ranks of the heroic Skyforce. Launch into orbit… and into history!
Or do you want to be left behind when all your friends have enlisted and are valiantly soaring through the enemy ranks? When victory is ours, do you want to be the only one on the block without a good-luck Silver toe to hang proudly about your neck?
We know you do not want that! We know you are better than that, braver than that!
And our Flock Implants are safer than ever, now delivering a feeling of euphoria as they join your consciousness with your unit. No more migraines or depression! Now you battle in the skies a seamless unit, a bird on the wing with its brothers and sister on either side to support it, and never feel lost or alone again. Or is your individuality worth more than the survival of the human race?
The only question you need to ask yourself is this: Are you a true patriot, or aren’t you?
So what are you waiting for? Report to your nearest recruitment center today, and help save the world!
Brought to you by the United Skyforce.
Skyforce, Taking Back the Earth!
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by Clint Wilson | Jun 21, 2013 | Story
Author : Clint Wilson, Staff Writer
The thick, tightly packed blue grass bristled and rippled. From high above it was a smooth endless plain of vegetation, a shimmering inky velvet blanket stretched over a planetary sea.
As the two small white suns rose in the northeast, numerous tiny yellow heads appeared from their holes in the indigo fields. Long undulating segmented bodies quickly followed them. The legless creatures poured forth and slithered over the rough blue grass. And there they lay, somehow existing in this hostile environment, with less than 0.0009 atmospheres of pressure, and no liquid to breathe.
Despite the distance of the tiny suns, the creatures soaked up plentiful energy for their daily feed. Writhing and shimmering atop the floating blue fields they drank more than their fill.
By general appearance they were nearly identical to one another, besides the pubescent youths having two more segments than infants, and the mature adults two more again. Yet there was one who stood out from the others. It sported an artificial band, a blue strip of organic material, teeming with microscopic electric creatures, rearranging themselves thousands of times a second, sending radio waves pulsing down through the layers of the planetary ocean.
Two thousand kilometers below, in the depths of the western plain ice core city Phalanzedqua, scientists gathered around the meeting hub. Their eyeless heads pulsed as intake valves processed the thickly compressed methane rich seawater. Pinhole ejection ports on their backs bled black waste, it permeated their thick liquid atmosphere all around them, but it mattered not as they were completely without sight. They communicated through the electrical impulses of their microscopic symbiotic partners.
The head scientist linked his whiskers into the receiver ports of the main bio-computer. The machine, technically alive yet artificially grown and completely unaware of its function or duties, made millions of calculations per second. The scientist, known as Yachmaa, read the data through his whisker tips. He suddenly addressed the others and communicated.
“Quite incredible. It seems that the Yellow Quaxannai migrate all the way to the atmospheric ceiling,” Yachmaa paused for dramatic effect, “and then they breach the surface and leave the liquid!”
There were pulses of disbelief from around the hub. Yachmaa suddenly transmitted the data he had thus far received from his artificial band, attached to the unwitting creature days ago on a gutsy mission to the upper third. Everyone had been well trained, and protected by their pressure skins. Yet they had nearly missed the entire rising pod and had only gotten lucky with this straggler. Yet there he was, now sporting their tracking device up above the ceiling, transmitting valuable data from an unexplored frontier. The group floated transfixed, studying the spectrum of the alien habitat with its undulating fields and twin hot points.
Suddenly a bizarre flying creature swooped from the sky and snatched one of the Yellow Quaxannai in its hooked talons and then soared off with its long squirming meal.
Far below they all hovered bewildered as one of the scientists asked, “In the name of the core dweller, what in the world was that?”
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by submission | Jun 20, 2013 | Story |
Author : Kevin Richards
I stepped up the walk of the gravel drive, breathing in the cool, quiet night air. Ringing the doorbell, I was greeted by a sharply dressed woman with a pleasant smile. “I’m here for the party,” I said, pulling the invitation out of my jacket.
“Right this way.” We went down a hallway, and she opened the door to a ballroom. Balloons and a banner marked the door. I stepped inside, eager to meet the guests.
I’d spent some time trying to look nice for this. I had gone shopping and got designer skinny jeans, new sneakers, a silk black tie, crisp white shirt and a tailored blazer. “Evening,” I said amicably as I stepped into an empty room.
A bar sat in one corner, and tables with an assortment of hors d’ouevres sat on one wall. The only other person was a man slumped in a wheelchair. His only movement was to dart his eyes suddenly to me. Without moving a muscle he looked shocked.
“Party is a little dead professor,” I said. “Perhaps you should have sent the invitations out a little sooner. Says today’s date alright, the 28th, but it’s a bit of an issue since you sent these out on the 30th.”
“To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting anyone.” The professors synthesized voice sounded bemused.
“And, trust me, you weren’t disappointed. At least in my timeline anyways. This one seems much more interesting. I like it already. Champagne?” I popped the cork and poured two bubbling glasses.
“I’ll pass. We have a lot to talk about.”
“Indeed we do. In fact, I’d propose a toast- to you professor, for laying the groundwork that made this possible.” I drank a generous amount, grinning. “I’d expect this place to be packed. If travel backwards along this timeline is possible, where is everybody? I even went so far as to get 2009 Summer Quarter GQ so I’d look appropriate.”
“Perhaps it’s because you are the only person in this timeline to travel backwards this far. Or maybe the only backwards time traveler ever.”
“Interesting. Anyways, I thought I’d give you this.” I reached into jacket and removed a stack of papers. “Copy of Klein and Li’s paper on String Theory. Won the Nobel in ’34. They cite you quite heavily. See, you aren’t so much wrong as you-”
The doors burst open. Two men in black suits marched in. “You! With us! Now!”
“Who the hell are you? What the-” The suit on the right snatched the stack of papers, and the one on the left slapped a cuff around my wrist. What looked like a solid steel bar molded around my wrists. There was a prick on my neck and everything began to slow. Pointing back, they yelled “You didn’t see anything!”
As I was dragged from the room, everything fading, I heard the professor’s synthesized voice, “Or perhaps Time Travel is better regulated than most industries…”
by submission | Jun 19, 2013 | Story |
Author : James Zahardis
Ambassador Xiao, with decades of political service and negotiation of the Nigerian Treaty still evoked an inauspicious “Is this the best we’ve got?” when it was Worldcast that he would be sent to Arizona. He was a paunchy sexagenarian, whom one would expect to find on the golf course–not stepping off a combat glider into a Red Zone.
Xiao saluted General Allistar who pointed to the monumental basalt a quarter-mile away. Xiao switched his aviator sunglasses to binocular mode and shut his eyes. The preceding week reeled before him: his office with its shadow boxes brimming with medallions; his cup of Masala chai that went cold; and the live-feed of the sky over the canyon lands south of Flagstaff, as spacetime was broached.
Xiao opened his eyes. Cathedral Rock encompassed his field-of-view. He walked toward the rock.
“You want backup?” the General asked.
“It’s best if I do this on my own.”
Within three-hundred meters of the rock’s base the invaders appeared. Xiao retained his composure despite their crab-like forms, and multitudinous, undulating feelers.
“We expected Grays–not creatures out of Lovecraft or Bosch…” Xiao thought as they approached. Intelligence suspected they were foot soldiers. A larger one had a ‘boom-tube’ strapped across its back: it looked like a flute, yet a pulse from it disintegrated a jet squadron. Several horseshoe crab-size aliens clamored at Xiao’s feet. He noticed a red glow near his breast pocket originating from a stylus-shaped object in the tentacles of one of the aliens.
“Scanning for weapons? A bio-analyzer?” he wondered.
The aliens vanished. A downdraft wafted an odor into the canyon that reminded Xiao of cheap plastic Halloween costumes.
An eight-foot tall monstrosity materialized in front of him.
“A chimera!” the ambassador thought, staring at the alien’s reptilian-looking body, humanoid posture, and tufts of tentacle in place of a neck. Its face was mouthless and covered with obsidian disks. A cat-sized, spider-like creature was at its feet. It strode forward and looped a chain around Xiao’s neck. The tentacles of the chimera undulated and Xiao felt an odd sensation in his brain.
“Qan-tho’manos, representative of Dis–sympathies for battle-fallen offered,” the chimera-like being communicated.
“I am here on behalf of the President of the Republic of Sino-America and the United Nations of Earth. We welcome you and regret our unfortunate initial encounter,” Xiao replied.
“Dis from fringes observed–great cruelty of your race did learn–darkly dream of your humankind Dis spawn and minds of artists poisoned–a relief over Qlz’drn City on Great Sky-Vault your races brutality depicts,” Qan-tho’manos communicated.
Qan-tho’manos paused. The ambassador saw his reflection, like tiny tadpoles in oily pools, in the representative’s obsidian disks.
“Blended all Dis from galaxy sentient creations–life-code sacred in mutability infinite–last war humans–soldiers bearing life-code corrupted–killing efficient–abhorrent–now Dis came must.”
“But we negotiated peace an–eh–”
The ambassador’s mouth fused together.
“War for generations Dis not have–this peace to you extend we.”
The ambassador fell to the ground. His arms and legs were contracting and his epidermis hardening.
“Myranx your race becomes–humility learn will–servitude to Dis.”
Xiao was now a crab-like creature with the vestige of a man’s face. His final human memory was of the Nigerian Conference, when he negotiated world peace and ended the deployment of genetically enhanced troops; his final human emotion was compunction, realizing it had come too late.
END
by submission | Jun 18, 2013 | Story |
Author : Morrow Brady
I surfaced from the suckling gel, my memories muddied like debris in a low tide canal. I know gelwork has long term memory risks but this post work haze was getting ridiculous.
“Shell clear”, I mumbled.
Layered, milky scales shimmered transparent, revealing an outside view that needed a warning. My single room cell clung to the rim of a stadium sized crater and overlooked a hundred-strong blisterpak of similar cells carpeting the crater’s floor and walls. Beyond the crater’s rim, a blackened landscape receded, pricked with skylon antennae.
Above the chewed horizon was an asteroid, its rusty silhouette orthographically sculpted by mining operations.
A metallic Hadfield truss, shaped like a long-chain chemical structure, thrust upward from the horizon across ten miles of space. It anchored beyond into a pink regolith wad on the red asteroid.
Faint memories emerged. I was on asteroid Alpha. Out there was Gamma, a motherlode asteroid, rich in ship building ores and riddled with gel linked Minerbots.
Following their capture, asteroids Alpha and Gamma were towed into a stationary earth orbit to become astellites. Everyone knew them as the Twins. Their pirouetting dance over Japan, now part of everyday life.
Memories of my past life in Japan crashed into my thoughts, forcing me to sit down in shock. Memories of a good home and a love for sushi. Memories of corporate giant FukuCorp, looking me in the eye as it pissed in my pocket.
FukuCorp owned the Twins. Populating it with miners shanghaied through their Earth based restaurant chain FukuSushi. Shokunin robots installed at each restaurant, screened diners for suitability. It was eighteen months ago when I walked in for lunch that day. By my third plate, I was marked. Perhaps it was my chopstick dexterity or maybe my choice of dish from the sushi train satisfied the visual acuity tests. Either way, my life was about to change.
The seemingly innocent salmon nigiri I savoured, was laced with the Taste. A nanite laden serum, designed solely to control humans through addiction.
When saliva, tongue and Taste met, my jaw seized shut and I panicked. Starbursts of pent-up adrenaline released and moments later, the lockjaw dissipated. Biochemical energy cascaded in bands of relaxing warmth down my cheeks making my jaw peacefully slump. The warmth seeped through my neck. Wriggling into my spinal column only to rocket upward and gush into my skull. It flooded my brain with pure ecstasy making me swim in eye rolling joy. A layered cascade tickled every nerve ending in my body, leaving my joints lubricated and free. Thoughts became precise and true. I remembered every experience of my life journey.
I opened my eyes, having no memory of closing them. The restaurant remained unchanged.
A shiver down my spine preceded a strange feeling that I came to recognise as an all consuming emptiness. An aftertaste that would drive me to the heavens.
The Taste lingered on. Gifmarking my retina with a looping animation of the Twins and barraging my body with waves of discomfort. This depleted what remained of my mental strength, finally defeating me physiologically on the second day. I signed my life to FukuCorp in the afternoon and was space bound in an ascent dirigible the next morning. By week’s end, with training complete, I was sealed into my cell and charged with operating over a dozen drillbot teams via gel-link.
The gel bath delivers Taste and sustenance. The immersion period grows the less I remember. Maybe I will stay under a while longer this shift.
